The Mech Touch (Web Novel)

Ves misjudged his own strength. He accidentally launched a stronger punch than he intended. The brief spike of pain that resulted from his ill-advised action temporarily scattered his concentration and scrambled his thoughts.

Still, he didn't punch himself that hard. He quickly regained his wits as the spike of pain quickly faded into the background.

"Right. My mech design is almost complete! I just need to put the finishing touches on it before I can proceed to the next phase."

The false inspired state that he had managed to induce on himself was a little different this time.

Part of it was because he didn't make use of his regular tool this time. The Hammer of Brilliance was specifically designed to accommodate and channel Vulcan's strength.

His own fist on the other hand was just a regular human organ. It wasn't geared towards channeling spiritual phenomena at all. Was it any surprise that his false inspired state was weaker and less focused this time?

Another reason why it was weaker was because he had used it too often lately. After he had completed the Everchanger, he did not engage in any further significant design work.

Sure, he learned and gained a lot of inspiration from observing many new mechs in the Red Ocean. His visit to the Chance Bay Masterwork Gallery was especially fruitful.

It was a pity that these harvests weren't as good as practicing his own craft.

If it was that easy to become good at something by watching other people's work, then Ves could have easily learned how to play a musical instrument by attending a concert!

"I shouldn't complain." He muttered to himself. "I don't need to depend on this to deliver a good competition mech."

He just wanted to add extra icing on the cake.

Ves disregarded his relative lack of accumulation and focused on spending the remainder of his time on more productive matters.

When he looked at the results of his efforts up to this point, he was quite proud of himself. He managed to piece together a completely serviceable lancer mech design that was already quite sound despite spending so little time on it. The design also acquired a respectable spiritual character.

Though Ves could do little about the relative lack of strength, he made sure to pour as much of his passion, enthusiasm and effort into his work. This at least enabled him to pass on as much strength to his mech design as he could in the allotted time.

"Using themes to focus my work in a specific direction also helps. There is less wasted or dormant potential."

Theoretically, this might not be entirely good.

The parts of a living mech that weren't usable might slowly turn into a new aspect after a living mech experienced a round of growth.

He could be wrong, though. It might be that wasted potential remained this way no matter how much a living mech grew.

Ves hadn't observed enough living mechs that had grown significantly from their starting points to have a definite answer.

"Regardless, I don't think this is the wrong choice for this situation. My mech won't be relevant long enough for growth to matter. What I should be really doing is converting every bit of free potential into useful elements."

The result of this deliberate strategy was that his competition mech should already possess a fairly strong and defined personality right out of the gate.

"Anyway, let's focus on the areas that I can still improve in the short time I have left."

His false inspired state didn't last forever, and slowly tapered off in strength over time. Its effect was strongest in the beginning, which meant that Ves could not afford to remain idle!

As he quickly swept the other aspects of his design, he identified a lot of sub-optimal implementations that could clearly be improved.

He already identified most of them because he was conscious about what he had done to his design. It was painful for him to apply a solution that he knew was bad, but he didn't have any other choice. All of the better solutions required him to invest a lot of hours or even days to come up with a proper implementation.

Putting himself in a false inspired state didn't change much in this regard. Brilliance was no substitute to honest work. At most, Ves suddenly connected a few dots and came up with a couple of easy solutions that had eluded him earlier.

He quickly adjusted his mech design in order to apply these quick and elegant fixes.

Once he picked the few low-hanging fruit available to him, he no longer identified any further areas that he could improve with the time that he had available.

The more he became constrained by the time limit, the more he chafed at this restriction.

"It's so frustrating to see so many shortcomings but not being able to do anything about them!" He complained.

It must be a lot worse for Gloriana. He understood a lot better why his wife avoided design duels and design competitions like the plague.

Still, Ves wasn't as sensitive as her, so he was able to cope with this condition. He suppressed his dislike as much as possible and tried to immerse himself in the variables that he could still affect under the current conditions.

After tweaking his mech design here and there, Ves finally chose to finalize his mech design even though it was far from optimized.

"It'll have to do." He muttered.

Was he satisfied? Not really.

Was he confident it was good enough? Yes.

"It's not as if everyone else has more time than me. We're all subject to this dreadfully short time limit!"

Reminding himself of this made him feel a bit better. As long as everyone else suffered as much as him, there was no reason for him to feel as if he was being tormented!

After making one last check to make sure that he didn't miss any egregious faults, he stood up from his chair and approached the nearby superfab.

As a modern, state-of-the-art production machine that was powerful enough to produce an entire mech within a span of a couple of hours, the machine was huge.

Each superfab was larger than a mech and the Korok Alpha KA-35 could comfortably envelop an entire heavy mech!

Billions of complicated parts and systems hid behind its smooth surface. Each of them were capable of working in tandem to perform all of the intensive production tasks that were ordinarily performed by standalone production machines. The way in which the developers managed to stuff all of these functions into a single, all-encompassing object was a marvelous feat of engineering!

Ves would have felt quite nervous about handling this powerful piece of equipment. This was the first time he handled such a device for real.

During his simulation practice, he generally managed to tame its powerful production processes. Its high consistency combined with lots of automation granted Ves a huge margin for error.

Even if he screwed up in some way, the watchful AI of the superfab would automatically catch his mistake before it resulted in a botched production result!

The issue was that Ves did not feel content with staying within the safety rails.

He wanted to achieve more. When he produced his other mechs, he was used to falling back on manual control in order to improve his output beyond a normal range.

This was a delicate operation that required a lot of skill and experience to perform properly.

The effort was worth it as long as he had the skill to back it up. Though Gloriana was even better at using manual control to improve the quality of a product, Ves was no slouch in this regard!

He already gained enough proficiency with the production machines of his personal workshop for this operation to become second nature.

The same could not be said for a superfab.

It was like comparing a docile pony to a wild stallion. The latter was clearly stronger and faster in every measure, but the rider was only one mistake away from losing control and getting launched out of his saddle!

It did not help that the products of Hysphalin Industries were notorious for making it difficult to exert manual control. Automation and fault prevention was baked into the Korok Aalph's design from the ground up. It wasn't optimized for situations where the person controlling the superfab wanted to override the judgment of the controlling AI.

Ves learned first-hand what could go wrong during the many instances he screwed up during simulation training.

At best, only a single part under production had to be scrapped.

At worst, explosions erupted inside the machine as a cascade of mistakes broke the mech under construction and also unleashed powerful energies that destroyed the superfab from the inside!

Just the thought about ruining a machine with a list price of 39,999 MTA credits sent palpitations through his heart!

An ordinary mech designer would have gotten the message and accepted the reality that the Korok Alpha KA-35 simply shouldn't be used in this fashion.

Ves was not an ordinary mech designer.

He needed to leverage as many advantages as possible in order to produce a strong competition mech. Sure, leaving all of the heavy lifting to the superfab guaranteed a workable result, but the output could be so much better if he took charge in certain instances!

This was why Ves decided to take the risk of riding this wild stallion.

He was not being reckless. He was taking a calculated risk.

There were two reasons why he was confident that it would work out this time.

First, he intended to restrain himself whenever he took manual control. This was also why he felt it was important to reserve an extra hour of fabrication time for himself.

He acted differently during his simulation training. He not only worked faster, but deliberately pushed the limits of the Korok Alpha at the time! He learned a lot of ways of how the production process could go wrong through triggering repeated disasters. He would be stupid if he repeated those exact same mistakes!

The second reason why he was confident that he could succeed without making any mistakes was because he had the backing of Vulcan.

Craftsmanship was one of his incarnation's core domains, and borrowing this aspect granted Ves a more intuitive sense in any production-related matters.

It did not matter that Ves was new to superfabs. He had done his homework, which meant that Vulcan also learned how they work. That was enough for the design spirit to assist Ves in various ways.

In combination, these two factors should safely allow Ves to exert a measure of manual control over the superfab and substantially elevate the quality of his competition mech!

"Well, this is it. No more delays."

Ve took a deep breath as he stood before the massive Korok Alpha. He steadily approached the primary console and began to inspect the condition of the machine.

The Korok Alpha was already warmed up and ready to go. After confirming that the superfab wasn't suffering from any faults, he started up the first operations of his production run.

The projected information panels and technical diagrams showed that the first parts of his lancer mech were being formed in a matter of seconds!

"So fast!"

Although Ves clearly knew that superfabs were insanely fast, he was still impressed by the power he had at his disposal.

He deeply wanted to bring back a superfab to the Spirit of Bentheim!

With just a single of these devices, he could easily fabricate mechs and exercise his craftsmanship without investing an excessive amount of time!

The difference between a couple of hours and a week of production time was massive! If Ves had full access to his own superfab, then many different options opened up to him. He no longer had to wait for months before he had a good reason to fabricate another mech!